set her less infatuate students to thinking. Many of them decided to investigate the Quimby claim, and bought the works of the Rev. Warren F. Evans,[1] who had been treated by Quimby a year after Mrs. Eddy's first visit to Portland, who had practised Quimby's method of healing both in New Hampshire and in Massachusetts, and who had published two books upon mental healing before the first edition of Science and Health appeared—The Mental Cure (1869) and Mental Medicine (1872).
Dr. Evans' early works had a mildness of tone which strongly appealed to such of Mrs. Eddy's students as were interested in the principle of mental healing alone, and were somewhat repelled by the garnishings which she had added to it. Evans did not deny the existence of disease, much less of matter; he simply affirmed the power of mind. His work The Mental Cure is little more than a study of the reactions of mental states upon the organs of the body. After reading Dr. Evans,
- ↑ The Rev. Warren Felt Evans, M.D., was born in Rockingham, Vt., December 23, 1817. He was educated at Chester Academy, Middlebury College, and Dartmouth College. Later he was granted a diploma from a chartered board of physicians of the Eclectic School, which entitled him to the degree M.D. Mr. Evans left Dartmouth in the middle of his junior year and entered the ministry of the Methodist Episcopal Church. For about twenty years he remained in the ministry, holding charges in various towns in New Hampshire and Massachusetts. He had been frail since his youth, and during the later years of his ministry was ill much of the time. It was in those years of broken health that he began to study the works of Emanuel Swedenborg, and came to believe in the possibility of curing physical disease through "the power of a living faith." About the year 1863 Dr. Evans went to Mr. Quimby for treatment. He was able to grasp Quimby's theories almost immediately, and became so much interested in Quimby's work that he soon returned to Portland upon a second visit. Dr. Evans then told Mr. Quimby that he felt he could himself practice Quimby's method of mind cure. Receiving cordial encouragement, he returned to his home at Claremont, New Hampshire, and at once began to practise. He later conducted a kind of mind-cure sanatorium, known as the "Evans Home," at Salisbury, Mass. The later years of his life were chiefly devoted to his literary work, and he published a number of books upon mental healing. They were The Mental Cure (1869), Mental Medicine (1872), Soul and Body (1875), The Divine Law of Cure (1881), The Primitive Mind Cure (1885), and Esoteric Christianity (1886).
Dr. Evans died September 4, 1889. Personally he was devout and modest, a thinker, and a reader, rather than a propagandist. His endeavour was to prove that mind cure is one of the old rectifying forces of the world, and he made no claim to discovery or to especial enlightenment. His great desire was to arouse other people to thinking and writing upon the subject of metaphysical healing.
